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03 Jun 2013

Shadows close in on a Connecticut family in the Playwrights Horizons world-premiere musical Far From Heaven. Kelli O'Hara, Steven Pasquale and Isaiah Johnson star in the musical adaptation of Todd Haynes' 1950s-set film, which officially opened June 2 Off-Broadway.

The musical by Tony Award-nominated Grey Gardens songwriters Michael Korie and Scott Frankel and Take Me Out Tony Award winner Richard Greenberg began previews May 8. The initial run sold-out, prompting Playwrights Horizons to extend the production an additional week to July 7. Tickets are available for the extension.

Far From Heaven, directed by Tony nominee Michael Greif (Grey Gardens, Rent, Next to Normal), arrives in New York following a developmental premiere at the Williamstown Theatre Festival last summer. O'Hara (South Pacific, The Light in the Piazza) and Pasquale (A Man of No Importance, Intelligent Homosexual's Guide) created their respective roles of Cathy and Frank Whittaker for the show at Williamstown.

Johnson (Peter and the Starcatcher; The Merchant of Venice on Broadway) stars as Raymond, the African American gardner who inspires hope within Cathy for a new life beyond her isolated suburban existence.

In the show, according to PH, "Cathy Whitaker (O'Hara) seems to be the picture-perfect wife and mother in 1957 suburban Connecticut. But roiling beneath the surface, secret longings and forbidden desires cause her world to unravel, with incendiary consequences. With a lush score that is both jazz-inflected and hauntingly lyrical, Far From Heaven is a powerful story of romance, betrayal and intolerance, as a woman grapples with her identity in a society on the verge of upheaval."

"If I had ever entertained any ideas of doing pastiche-period songs, Richard Greenberg was not into that at all," Korie told Playbill.com in a 2012 interview about the project. "He took the stories completely seriously. So we went on the assumption that the music would take the place of the stylization and cinematography of the film. When we started writing songs, almost immediately that seemed to prove true. And when we did the first reading, the story just worked, and the music maybe even intensified it. It's a mostly-music musical — in a Rodgers and Hammerstein vein, where you take the characters seriously. You don't write genre cream-puff songs. You write from character."